PAHS Woodshop Students Involved in Community Project

Port Angeles High School juniors Sawyer Larsen, Glenn Deckard and Mariah Fortman have an opportunity to utilize multiple skills in planning, presenting, designing, and producing a new ‘welcome’ sign for the City of Port Angeles. The current sign, located on the west end of town on Lincoln Street, next to Jefferson Elementary School’s playing fields, is showing signs of weather and wear.

The students have already had several meetings with city leaders. On November 16 they met with the city council in the City Hall chambers to present their art and draft design for the project. Corey Delikat, Parks & Recreation Director, is their main point of contact with the City of Port Angeles.

“I spoke to the council members and they are very impressed and pleased with the project,” said Lillian Easton, health services instructor at Port Angeles High School. “My son Sawyer is one of the artists who designed the sign and will be making a scale model for the next meeting.”

The new sign will be twelve feet long, made of Douglas Fir.

Glenn Deckard, project leader, estimates the project could take upwards of 500 hours of work. The trio has already put in 120 hours on the project since the beginning of the school year.

Deckard had interest in making a new sign, and finally stopped and measured the existing sign one day. After considering things, he found that the SkillsUSA challenge, coming up in February 2018, requires a project team to have three people. At that time, Mariah Fortman, task manager, and Sawyer Larsen, designer, came on board. All are eleventh graders and have had multiple years of woodworking classes.

“We want it to last for a long, long time,” said Glenn. “This is a long-term commitment.” Students plan to keep up maintenance after the new sign is standing. The project will include reposting, adding spot lighting, improving the flower bed around the sign, and possibly adding a message to the back side of the sign.

The students are currently in the design phase, and are working on the workshop’s CNC ShopBot. “That stands for Computer Numerical Control,” explained Mariah.

The CNC’s cutting table is eight feet long, and the piece of wood for the sign is over 13 feet long. This requires some thorough strategizing. To compensate for the fact their cutting table is not long enough for the piece of wood, their plan is to perform the cuts in three steps.

The cuts will also be made in three layers to give dimension, or depth, to the image. The sign includes an outlined image of the Olympic Mountains and trees.

“The computer programming phase is very lengthy and involved,” said Glenn. “After we entered the coordinates for the drawings, we found there were 74 open vectors where lines didn’t quite connect, so had to painstakingly go in and connect them.”

“We’ve done a lot of troubleshooting, then we had to present our ideas to the sub-committee, which included a lot of PAHS grads. That was cool,” said Glenn.

In addition to the Welcome to Port Angeles message, the sign will include the Klallam phrase for greeting. The students have plans to connect with Lower Elwha Tribal representatives to talk about the project and check on the correctness of spelling and punctuation for the Klallam greeting phrase.

Tim Branham is the teacher and advisor for advanced woodworking at Port Angeles High School. “Our teacher, Mr. Branham, has allowed us to learn this project on our own. He’s available to work with us, but first gives us the opportunity to work things out. I like to learn on my own, and I know I can get help if I need,” said Glenn.

“This is a great opportunity for us,” continued Glenn. “There’s a lot to learn from this project.”

“We’re the only woodshop class on the peninsula,” said Mariah. “We’re pretty excited about taking this project to SkillsUSA competition!”

The group promised to have more to show for their efforts by the end of January, when they’ll be preparing for competition.

“It’s so cool to see the kids collaborating on projects like this for the community,” said Easton.

Current Welcome to PA Sign 002 – The current sign, located on the west end of town on Lincoln Street, next to Jefferson Elementary School, is showing signs of weather and wear. Efforts to replace the sign are in the works, thanks to the Port Angeles City officials and three Port Angels High School woodshop students.

PAHS Advanced Woodworking 011 (photo by Patsene Dashiell) – Port Angeles High School juniors Sawyer Larson, Glenn Deckard and Mariah Fortman have an opportunity to utilize multiple skills in planning, designing, presenting and producing a new ‘welcome’ sign for the west end of town. Deckard estimates the project could take upwards of 500 hours of work. The trio has put in 120 hours towards the project since the beginning of the school year.